The writer of this singular autobiography was my cousin, who died atthe ----- Criminal Lunatic Asylum, of which he had been an inmatethree years.

He had been removed thither after a sudden and violent attack ofhomicidal mania (which fortunately led to no serious consequences),from ----- Jail, where he had spent twenty-five years, having beencondemned to penal servitude for life, for the murder of ---- ----,his relative.

He had been originally sentenced to death.

It was at ---- Lunatic Asylum that he wrote these memoirs, and I receivedthe MS. soon after his decease, with the most touching letter, appealingto our early friendship, and appointing me his literary executrix.

It was his wish that the story of his life should be published just ashe had written it.

I have found it unadvisable to do this. It would revive, to no usefulpurpose, an old scandal, long buried and forgotten, and thereby givepain or annoyance to people who are still alive.

Nor does his memory require rehabilitation among those who knew him, orknew anything of him--the only people really concerned. His dreadfuldeed has long been condoned by all (and they are many) who knew theprovocation he had received and the character of the man who hadprovoked him.

On mature consideration, and with advice, I resolved (in order that hisdying wishes should not be frustrated altogether) to publish the memoirwith certain alterations and emendations.

I have nearly everywhere changed the names of people and places;suppressed certain details, and omitted some passages of his life (mostof the story of his school-days, for instance, and that of his briefcareer as a private in the Horse Guards) lest they should too easilylead to the identification and annoyance of people still alive, for heis strongly personal at times, and perhaps not always just; and someother events I have carefully paraphrased (notably his trial at the OldBailey), and given for them as careful an equivalent as I could managewithout too great a loss of verisimilitude.

I may as well state at once that, allowing for these alterations, everyincident of his _natural_ life as described by himself is absolutelytrue, to the minutest detail, as I have been able to ascertain.

For the early part of it--the life at Passy he describes with suchaffection--I can vouch personally; I am the Cousin "Madge" to whom heonce or twice refers.

I well remember the genial abode where he lived with his parents (mydear uncle and aunt); and the lovely "Madame Seraskier," and her husbandand daughter, and their house, "Parva sed Apta," and "Major Duquesnois,"and the rest.

And although I have never seen him since he was twelve years old, whenhis parents died and he went to London (as most of my life has beenspent abroad), I received occasional letters from him.

I have also been able to obtain much information about him from others,especially from a relative of the late "Mr. and Mrs. Lintot," who knewhim well, and from several officers in his regiment who remembered him;also from the "Vicar's daughter," whom he met at "Lady Cray's" and whoperfectly recollects the conversation she had with him at dinner, hissudden indisposition, and his long interview with the "Duchess ofTowers," under the ash-tree next morning; she was one of thecroquet-players.

He was the most beautiful boy I ever saw, and so charming, lively, andamiable that everybody was fond of him. He had a horror of cruelty,especially to animals (quite singular in a boy of his age), and was verytruthful and brave.

According to all accounts (and from a photograph in my possession), hegrew up to be as handsome as a man can well be, a personal gift which heseems to have held of no account whatever, though he thought so much ofit in others. But he also became singularly shy and reserved in manner,over-diffident and self-distrustful; of a melancholy disposition, lovingsolitude, living much alone, and taking nobody into his confidence; andyet inspiring both affection and respect. For he seems to have alwaysbeen thoroughly gentlemanlike in speech, bearing, manner, and aspect.

It is possible, although he does not say so, that having first enlisted,and then entered upon a professional career under somewhat inauspiciousconditions, he felt himself to have fallen away from the social rank(such as it was) that belonged to him by birth; and he may have foundhis associates uncongenial.

His old letters to me are charmingly open and effusive.

Of the lady whom (keeping her title and altering her name) I have calledthe "Duchess of Towers," I find it difficult to speak. That they onlymet twice, and in the way he describes, is a fact about which there canbe no doubt.

It is also indubitable that he received in Newgate, on the morning afterhis sentence to death, an envelope containing violets, and the strangemessage he mentions. Both letter and violets are in my possession, andthe words are in her handwriting; about that there can be no mistake.

It is certain, moreover, that she separated from her husband almostimmediately after my cousin's trial and condemnation, and lived incomparative retirement from the world, as it is certain that he wentsuddenly mad, twenty-five years later, in ---- Jail, a few hours afterher tragic death, and before he could possibly have heard of it by theordinary channels; and that he was sent to ---- Asylum, where, after hisfrenzy had subsided, he remained for many days in a state of suicidalmelancholia, until, to the surprise of all, he rose one morning in highspirits, and apparently cured of all serious symptoms of insanity; so heremained until his death. It was during the last year of his life thathe wrote his autobiography, in French and English.

There is nothing to be surprised at, taking all the circumstances intoconsideration, that even so great a lady, the friend of queens andempresses, the bearer of a high title and an illustrious name, justlycelebrated for her beauty and charm (and her endless charities), ofblameless repute, and one of the most popular women in English society,should yet have conceived a very warm regard for my poor cousin; indeed,it was an open secret in the family of "Lord Cray" that she had done so.But for them she would have taken the whole world into her confidence.

After her death she left him what money had come to her from her father,which he disposed of for charitable ends, and an immense quantity of MS.in cipher--a cipher which is evidently identical with that he usedhimself in the annotations he put under innumerable sketches he wasallowed to make during his long period of confinement, which (throughher interest, and no doubt through his own good conduct) was rendered asbearable to him as possible. These sketches (which are veryextraordinary) and her Grace's MS. are now in my possession.

They constitute a mystery into which I have not dared to pry.

From papers belonging to both I have been able to establish beyond doubtthe fact (so strangely discovered) of their descent from a common Frenchancestress, whose name I have but slightly modified and the tradition ofwhom still lingers in the "Departement de la Sarthe," where she was afamous person a century ago; and her violin, a valuable Amati, nowbelongs to me.

Of the non-natural part of his story I will not say much.

It is, of course, a fact that he had been absolutely and, to allappearance, incurably insane before he wrote his life.

There seems to have been a difference of opinion, or rather a doubt,among the authorities of the asylum as to whether he was mad after theacute but very violent period of his brief attack had ended.

Whichever may have been the case, I am at least convinced of this: thathe was no romancer, and thoroughly believed in the extraordinary mentalexperience he has revealed.

At the risk of being thought to share his madness--if he _was_ mad--Iwill conclude by saying that I, for one, believe him to have been sane,and to have told the truth all through.

MADGE PLUNKET

I am but a poor scribe; ill-versed in the craft of wielding words andphrases, as the cultivated reader (if I should ever happen to have one)will no doubt very soon find out for himself.

[Illustration:]

I have been for many years an object of pity and contempt to all whoever gave me a thought--to all but _one_! Yet of all that ever lived onthis earth I have been, perhaps, the happiest and most privileged, asthat reader will discover if he perseveres to the end.

My outer and my inner life have been as the very poles--asunder; and if,at the eleventh hour, I have made up my mind to give my story to theworld, it is not in order to rehabilitate myself in the eyes of myfellow-men, deeply as I value their good opinion; for I have alwaysloved them and wished them well, and would fain express my goodwill andwin theirs, if that were possible.

It is because the regions where I have found my felicity are accessibleto all, and that many, better trained and better gifted, will explorethem to far better purpose than I, and to the greater glory and benefitof mankind, when once I have given them the clew. Before I can do this,and in order to show how I came by this clew myself, I must tell, aswell as I may, the tale of my checkered career--in telling which,moreover, I am obeying the last behest of one whose lightest wish wasmy law.

If I am more prolix than I need be, it must be set down to my want ofexperience in the art of literary composition--to a natural wish I haveto show myself neither better nor worse than I believe myself to be; tothe charm, the unspeakable charm, that personal reminiscences have forthe person principally concerned, and which he cannot hope to impart,however keenly he may feel it, without gifts and advantages that havebeen denied to me.

And this leads me to apologize for the egotism of this Memoir, which isbut an introduction to another and longer one that I hope to publishlater. To write a story of paramount importance to mankind, it is true,but all about one's outer and one's inner self, to do this withoutseeming somewhat egotistical, requires something akin to genius--and Iam but a poor scribe.

* * * * *

"_Combien j'ai douce souvenance Du joli lieu de ma naissance_!"

These quaint lines have been running in my head at intervals throughnearly all my outer life, like an oft-recurring burden in an endlessballad--sadly monotonous, alas! the ballad, which is mine; sweetlymonotonous the burden, which is by Châteaubriand.

I sometimes think that to feel the full significance of this refrain onemust have passed one's childhood in sunny France, where it was written,and the remainder of one's existence in mere London--or worse than mereLondon--as has been the case with me. If I had spent all my life frominfancy upward in Bloomsbury, or Clerkenwell, or Whitechapel, my earlydays would be shorn of much of their retrospective glamour as I lookback on them in these my after-years.

_"Combien j'ai douce souvenance!"_

It was on a beautiful June morning in a charming French garden, wherethe warm, sweet atmosphere was laden with the scent of lilac andsyringa, and gay with butterflies and dragon-flies and humblebees, thatI began my conscious existence with the happiest day of all myouter life.

It is true that I had vague memories (with many a blank between) of adingy house in the heart of London, in a long street of desolatingstraightness, that led to a dreary square and back again, and nowhereelse for me; and then of a troubled and exciting journey that seemed ofjumbled days and nights. I could recall the blue stage-coach with thefour tall, thin, brown horses, so quiet and modest and well-behaved; thered-coated guard and his horn; the red-faced driver and his husky voiceand many capes.

Then the steamer with its glistening deck, so beautiful and white itseemed quite a desecration to walk upon it--this spotlessness did notlast very long; and then two wooden piers with a light-house on each,and a quay, and blue-bloused workmen and red-legged little soldiers withmustaches, and bare-legged fisher-women, all speaking a language that Iknew as well as the other commoner language I had left behind; but whichI had always looked upon as an exclusive possession of my father's andmother's and mine for the exchange of sweet confidence and thebewilderment of outsiders; and here were little boys and girls in thestreet, quite common children, who spoke it as well and better than Idid myself.

After this came the dream of a strange, huge, top-heavy vehicle, thatseemed like three yellow carriages stuck together, and a mountain ofluggage at the top under an immense black tarpaulin, which ended in ahood; and beneath the hood sat a blue-bloused man with a singular cap,like a concertina, and mustaches, who cracked a loud whip over fivesquealing, fussy, pugnacious white and gray horses, with bells on theirnecks and bushy fox-tails on their foreheads, and their own tailscarefully tucked up behind.

From the _coupé_ where I sat with my father and mother I could watchthem well as they led us through dusty roads with endless apple-trees orpoplars on either side. Little barefooted urchins (whose papas andmammas wore wooden shoes and funny white nightcaps) ran after us forFrench half-pennies, which were larger than English ones, and pleasanterto have and to hold! Up hill and down we went; over sounding woodenbridges, through roughly paved streets in pretty towns to largecourt-yards, where five other quarrelsome steeds, gray and white, werewaiting to take the place of the old ones--worn out, butquarreling still!

And through the night I could hear the gay music of the bells and hoofs,the rumbling of the wheels the cracking of the eternal whip, as Ifidgeted from one familiar lap to the other in search of sleep; andwaking out of a doze I could see the glare of the red lamps on the fivestraining white and gray backs that dragged us so gallantly through thedark summer night.

[Illustration: "A STRANGE, HUGE, TOP-HEAVY VEHICLE."]

Then it all became rather tiresome and intermittent and confused, tillwe reached at dusk next day a quay by a broad river; and as we drovealong it, under thick trees, we met other red and blue and green lampedfive-horsed diligences starting on their long journey just as ours wascoming to an end.

Then I knew (because I was a well-educated little boy, and heard myfather exclaim, "Here's Paris at last!") that we had entered the capitalof France--a fact that impressed me very much--so much, it seems, that Iwent to sleep for thirty-six hours at a stretch, and woke up to findmyself in the garden I have mentioned, and to retain possession of thatself without break or solution of continuity (except when I went tosleep again) until now.

* * * * *

The happiest day in all my outer life!

For in an old shed full of tools and lumber at the end of the garden,and half-way between an empty fowl-house and a disused stable (each anEden in itself) I found a small toy-wheelbarrow--quite the mostextraordinary, the most unheard of and undreamed of, humorously,daintily, exquisitely fascinating object I had ever come across in allmy brief existence.

I spent hours--enchanted hours--in wheeling brick-bats from the stableto the fowl-house, and more enchanted hours in wheeling them all backagain, while genial French workmen, who were busy in and out of thehouse where we were to live, stopped every now and then to askgood-natured questions of the "p'tit Anglais," and commend his knowledgeof their tongue, and his remarkable skill in the management of awheelbarrow. Well I remember wondering, with newly-arousedself-consciousness, at the intensity, the poignancy, the extremity of mybliss, and looking forward with happy confidence to an endlesssuccession of such hours in the future.

But next morning, though the weather was as fine, and the wheelbarrowand the brick-bats and the genial workmen were there, and all the scentsand sights and sounds were the same, the first fine careless rapture wasnot to be caught again, and the glory and the freshness had departed.

Thus did I, on the very dawning of life, reach at a single tide thehigh-water-mark of my earthly bliss--never to be reached again by me onthis side of the ivory gate--and discover that to make the perfection ofhuman happiness endure there must be something more than a sweet Frenchgarden, a small French wheelbarrow, and a nice little English boy whospoke French and had the love of approbation--a fourth dimensionis required.

I found it in due time.

But if there were no more enchanted hours like the first, there were tobe seven happy years that have the quality of enchantment as I lookback on them.

* * * * *

Oh, the beautiful garden! Roses, nasturtiums and convolvulus,wallflowers, sweet-pease and carnations, marigolds and sunflowers,dahlias and pansies and hollyhocks and poppies, and Heaven knows whatbesides! In my fond recollection they all bloom at once, irrespective oftime and season.

To see and smell and pick all these for the first time at thesusceptible age of five! To inherit such a kingdom after five years ofGower Street and Bedford Square! For all things are relative, andeverything depends upon the point of view. To the owner of Chatsworth(and to his gardeners) my beautiful French Garden would have seemed asmall affair.

[Illustration: LE P'TIT ANGLAIS.]

And what a world of insects--Chatsworth could not beat _these_ (indeed,is no doubt sadly lacking in them)--beautiful, interesting, comic,grotesque, and terrible; from the proud humble-bee to the earwig and hiscousin, the devil's coach-horse; and all those rampant, many footedthings that pullulate in damp and darkness under big flat stones. Tothink that I have been friends with all these--roses and centipedes andall--and then to think that most of my outer life has been spent betweenbare whitewashed walls, with never even a flea or a spider to be friendswith again!

Our house (where, by-the-way, I had been born five years before), an oldyellow house with green shutters and Mansard-roofs of slate, stoodbetween this garden and the street--a long winding street, roughlyflagged, with oil-lamps suspended across at long intervals; these lampswere let down with pulleys at dusk, replenished and lit, and then hauledup again to make darkness visible for a few hours on nights when themoon was away.

Opposite to us was a boys' school--"Maison d'Éducation, Dirigée par M.Jules Saindou, Bachelier et Maître ès Lettres et ès Sciences," andauthor of a treatise on geology, with such hauntingly terrific picturesof antediluvian reptiles battling in the primeval slime that I havenever been able to forget them. My father, who was fond of science, mademe a present of it on my sixth birthday. It cost me many a nightmare.

From our windows we could see and hear the boys at play--at a properdistance French boys sound just like English ones, though they do notlook so, on account of their blue blouses and dusky, cropped heads--andwe could see the gymnastic fixtures in the play-ground, M. Saindou'spride. "Le portique! la poutre! le cheval! et les barres parallèles!"Thus they were described in M. Saindou's prospectus.

On either side of the street (which was called "the Street of thePump"), as far as eye could reach looking west, were dwelling-housesjust like our own, only agreeably different; and garden walls overtoppedwith the foliage of horse-chestnut, sycamore, acacia, and lime; and hereand there huge portals and iron gates defended by posts of stone gaveingress to mysterious abodes of brick and plaster and granite,many-shuttered, and embosomed in sun-shot greenery.

Looking east one could see in the near distance unsophisticated shopswith old-fashioned windows of many panes--Liard, the grocer; Corbin, thepoulterer; the butcher, the baker, the candlestick-maker.

And this delightful street, as it went on its winding way, led not toBedford Square or the new University College Hospital, but to Paristhrough the Arc de Triomphe at one end, and to the river Seine at theother; or else, turning to the right, to St. Cloud through the Bois deBoulogne of Louis Philippe Premier, Roi des Français--as different fromthe Paris and the Bois de Boulogne of to-day as a diligence from anexpress train.

On one side of the beautiful garden was another beautiful garden,separated from ours by a high wall covered with peach and pear and plumand apricot trees; on the other, accessible to us through a small doorin another lower wall clothed with jasmine, clematis, convolvulus, andnasturtium, was a long, straight avenue of almond-trees, acacia,laburnum, lilac, and may, so closely planted that the ivy-grown wallson either side could scarcely be seen. What lovely patches they made onthe ground when the sun shone! One end of this abutted on "the Street ofthe Pump," from which it was fenced by tall, elaborately-carved irongates between stone portals, and at the side was a "porte bâtarde,"guarded by le Père et la Mère François, the old concierge and his oldwife. Peace to their ashes, and Heaven rest their kindly, genial souls!

The other end of the avenue, where there was also an iron gate, admittedto a large private park that seemed to belong to nobody, and of which wewere free--a very wilderness of delight, a heaven, a terror of tangledthickets and not too dangerous chalk cliffs, disused old quarries anddark caverns, prairies of lush grass, sedgy pools, turnip fields,forests of pine, groves and avenues of horse-chestnut, dank valleys ofwalnut-trees and hawthorn, which summer made dark at noon; bare,wind-swept mountainous regions whence one could reconnoitre afar; allsorts of wild and fearsome places for savages and wild beasts to hideand small boys to roam quite safely in quest of perilous adventure.

All this vast enclosure (full of strange singing, humming, whistling,buzzing, twittering, cooing, booming, croaking, flying, creeping,crawling, jumping, climbing, burrowing, splashing, diving things) hadbeen neglected for ages--an Eden where one might gather and eat of thefruit of the tree of knowledge without fear, and learn lovingly the waysof life without losing one's innocence; a forest that had remade foritself a new virginity, and become primeval once more; where beautifulNature had reasserted her own sweet will, and massed and tangledeverything together as though a Beauty had been sleeping thereundisturbed for close on a hundred years, and was only waiting for thecharming Prince--or, as it turned out a few years later, alas! thespeculative builder and the railway engineer--those princes of our day.

My fond remembrance would tell me that this region was almost boundless,well as I remember its boundaries. My knowledge of physical geography,as applied to this particular suburb of Paris, bids me assign moremodest limits to this earthly paradise, which again was separated by aneasily surmounted fence from Louis Philippe's Bois de Boulogne; and tothis I cannot find it in my heart to assign any limits whatever, exceptthe pretty old town from which it takes its name, and whose principalstreet leads to that magical combination of river, bridge, palace,gardens, mountain, and forest, St. Cloud.

What more could be wanted for a small boy fresh (if such be freshness)from the very heart of Bloomsbury?

That not a single drop should be lacking to the full cup of that smallboy's felicity, there was a pond on the way from Passy to St. Cloud--amemorable pond, called "La Mare d'Auteuil," the sole aquatic treasurethat Louis Philippe's Bois de Boulogne could boast. For in thoseingenuous days there existed no artificial lake fed by an artificialstream, no pré-Catelan, no Jardin d'Acclimatation. The wood was just awood, and nothing more--a dense, wild wood, that covered many hundredsof acres, and sheltered many thousands of wild live things. Thoughmysteriously deep in the middle, this famous pond (which may have beencenturies old, and still exists) was not large; you might almost fling astone across it anywhere.

[Illustration]

Bounded on three sides by the forest (now shorn away), it was justhidden from the dusty road by a fringe of trees; and one could have itall to one's self, except on Sunday and Thursday afternoons, when a fewlove-sick Parisians remembered its existence, and in its lovelinessforgot their own.

To be there at all was to be happy; for not only was it quite the mostsecluded, picturesque, and beautiful pond in all the habitableglobe--that pond of ponds, the _only_ pond--but it teemed with a fargreater number and variety of wonderful insects and reptiles than anyother pond in the world. Such, at least, I believed must be the case,for they were endless.

To watch these creatures, to learn their ways, to catch them (which wesometimes did), to take them home and be kind to them, and try to tamethem, and teach them our ways (with never varying non-success, it istrue, but in, oh, such jolly company!) became a hobby that lasted me, onand off, for seven years.

La Mare d'Auteuil! The very name has a magic, from all the associationsthat gathered round it during that time, to cling forever.

How I loved it! At night, snoozing in my warm bed, I would awesomelythink of it, and how solemn it looked when I had reluctantly left it atdusk, an hour or two before; then I would picture it to myself, later,lying deep and cold and still under the stars, in the dark thicket, withall that weird, uncanny lite seething beneath its stagnant surface.

Then gradually the water would sink, and the reeds, left naked, begin tomove and rustle ominously, and from among their roots in the uncoveredslush everything alive would make for the middle--hopping, gliding,writhing frantically....

Down shrank the water; and soon in the slimy bottom, yards below, hugefat salamanders, long-lost and forgotten tadpoles as large as rats,gigantic toads, enormous flat beetles, all kinds of hairy, scaly, spiny,blear-eyed, bulbous, shapeless monsters without name, mud-coloredoffspring of the mire that had been sleeping there for hundreds ofyears, woke up, and crawled in and out, and wallowed and interwriggled,and devoured each other, like the great saurians and batrachians in my_Manuel de Géologie Élémentaire_. Édition illustrée à l'usage desenfants. Par Jules Saindou, Bachelier et Maître ès Lettres etès Sciences.

Then would I wake up with a start, in a cold perspiration, an icy chillshooting through me that roughed my skin and stirred the roots of myhair, and ardently wish for to-morrow morning.

In after-years, and far away among the cold fogs of Clerkenwell, whenthe frequent longing would come over me to revisit "the pretty place ofmy birth," it was for the Mare d'Auteuil I longed the most; _that_ wasthe loadstar, the very pole of my home-sick desires; always thither thewings of my hopeless fancy bore me first of all; it was, oh! to treadthat sunlit grassy brink once more, and to watch the merry tadpolesswarm, and the green frog takes its header like a little man, and thewater-rat swim to his hole among the roots of the willow, and thehorse-leech thread his undulating way between the water-lily stems; andto dream fondly of the delightful, irrevocable past, on the very spot ofall where I and mine were always happiest!

"...Qu'ils étaient beaux, les jours De France!"

In the avenue I have mentioned (_the_ avenue, as it is still to me, andas I will always call it) there was on the right hand, half the way up,a _maison de santé_, or boarding-house, kept by one Madame Pelé; andthere among others came to board and lodge, a short while after ouradvent, four or five gentlemen who had tried to invade France, with acertain grim Pretender at their head, and a tame eagle as a symbol ofempire to rally round.

The expedition had failed; the Pretender had been consigned to afortress; the eagle had found a home in the public slaughter-house ofBoulogne-sur-Mer, which it adorned for many years, and where it fed asit had never probably fed before; and these, the faithful followers, leColonel Voisil, le Major Duquesnois, le Capitaine Audenis, le DocteurLombal (and one or two others whose names I have forgotten), wereprisoners on parole at Madame Pelé's, and did not seem to find theirdurance very vile.

[Illustration: (no caption)]

I grew to know and love them all, especially the Major Duquesnois, analmost literal translation into French of Colonel Newcome. He took tome at once, in spite of my Englishness, and drilled me, and taught methe exercise as it was performed in the Vieille Garden and told me a newfairy-tale, I verily believe, every afternoon for seven years.Scheherezade could do no more for a Sultan, and to save her own neckfrom the bowstring!

Cher et bien amé "Vieux de la Vieille!" with his big iron-gray mustache,his black satin stock, his spotless linen, his long green frock-coat sobaggy about the skirts, and the smart red ribbon in his button-hole! Helittle foresaw with what warm and affectionate regard his memory wouldbe kept forever sweet and green in the heart of his hereditary foe andsmall English tyrant and companion!

* * * * *

Opposite Madame Pelé's, and the only other dwelling besides hers andours in the avenue, was a charming little white villa with a Grecianportico, on which were inscribed in letters of gold the words "Parva sedApta"; but it was not tenanted till two or three years afterour arrival.

In the genial French fashion of those times we soon got on terms ofintimacy with these and other neighbors, and saw much of each other atall times of the day.

My tall and beautiful young mother (la belle Madame Pasquier, as she wasgallantly called) was an Englishwoman who had been born and partlybrought up in Paris.

My gay and jovial father (le beau Pasquier, for he was also tall andcomely to the eye) was a Frenchman, although an English subject, who hadbeen born and partly brought up in London; for he was the child ofemigres from France during the Reign of Terror.

[Illustration]

"When in death I shall calm recline, Oh take my heart to my mistress dear! Tell her it lived upon smiles and wine Of the brightest hue while it lingered here!"

He was gifted with a magnificent, a phenomenal voice--a barytone andtenor rolled into one; a marvel of richness, sweetness, flexibility, andpower--and had intended to sing at the opera; indeed, he had studied forthree years at the Paris Conservatoire to that end; and there he hadcarried all before him, and given rise to the highest hopes. But hisfamily, who were Catholics of the blackest and Legitimists of thewhitest dye--and as poor as church rats had objected to such a godlessand derogatory career; so the world lost a great singer, and the greatsinger a mine of wealth and fame.

However, he had just enough to live upon, and had married a wife (aheretic!) who had just about as much, or as little; and he spent histime, and both his money and hers, in scientific inventions--to littlepurpose, for well as he had learned how to sing, he had not been to anyconservatoire where they teach one how to invent.

So that, as he waited "for his ship to come home," he sang only to amusehis wife, as they say the nightingale does; and to ease himself ofsuperfluous energy, and to charm the servants, and le Père et la MèreFrançois, and the five followers of Napoleon, and all and everybody whocared to listen, and last and least (and most!), myself.

For this great neglected gift of his, on which he set so little store,was already to me the most beautiful and mysterious thing in the world;and next to this, my mother's sweet playing on the harp and piano, forshe was an admirable musician.

It was her custom to play at night, leaving the door of my bedroom ajar,and also the drawing-room door, so that I could hear her till I fellasleep.

Sometimes, when my father was at home, the spirit would move him to humor sing the airs she played, as he paced up and down the room on thetrack of a new invention.

And though he sang and hummed "pian-piano," the sweet, searching, manlytones seemed to fill all space.

The hushed house became a sounding-board, the harp a mere subservienttinkle, and my small, excitable frame would thrill and vibrate under thewaves of my unconscious father's voice; and oh, the charming airshe sang!

His stock was inexhaustible, and so was hers; and thus an endlesssuccession of lovely melodies went ringing through that happy period.

And just as when a man is drowning, or falling from a height, his wholepast life is said to be mapped out before his mental vision as in asingle flash, so seven years of sweet, priceless home love--seven timesfour changing seasons of simple, genial, prae-imperial Frenchness; anideal house, with all its pretty furniture, and shape, and color; agarden full of trees and flowers; a large park, and all the wild livethings therein; a town and its inhabitants; a mile or two of historicriver; a wood big enough to reach from the Arc de Triomphe to St. Cloud(and in it the pond of ponds); and every wind and weather that thechanging seasons can bring--all lie embedded and embalmed for me inevery single bar of at least a hundred different tunes, to be evoked atwill for the small trouble and cost of just whistling or humming thesame, or even playing it with one finger on the piano--when I had apiano within reach.

Enough to last me for a lifetime--with proper economy, of course--itwill not do to exhaust, by too frequent experiment, the strange capacityof a melodic bar for preserving the essence of by-gone things, and daysthat are no more.

Oh, Nightingale! whether thou singest thyself or, better still, if thyvoice by not in thy throat, but in thy fiery heart and subtle brain, andthou makest songs for the singing of many others, blessed be thy name!The very sound of it is sweet in every clime and tongue: Nightingale,Rossignol, Usignuolo, Bulbul! Even Nachtigall does not sound amiss inthe mouth of a fair English girl who has had a Hanoverian for agoverness! and, indeed, it is in the Nachtigall's country that the bestmusic is made!

[Illustration: "OH, NIGHTINGALE!"]

And oh, Nightingale! never, never grudge thy song to those who loveit--nor waste it upon those who do not....

Thus serenaded, I would close my eyes, and lapped in darkness andwarmth and heavenly sound, be lulled asleep--perchance to dream!

For my early childhood was often haunted by a dream, which at first Itook for a reality--a transcendant dream of some interest and importanceto mankind, as the patient reader will admit in time. But many years ofmy life passed away before I was able to explain and account for it.

I had but to turn my face to the wall, and soon I found myself incompany with a lady who had white hair and a young face--a verybeautiful young face.

Sometimes I walked with her, hand in hand--I being quite a smallchild--and together we fed innumerable pigeons who lived in a tower by awinding stream that ended in a water-mill. It was too lovely, and Iwould wake.

Sometimes we went into a dark place, where there was a fiery furnacewith many holes, and many people working and moving about--among them aman with white hair and a young face, like the lady, and beautiful redheels to his shoes. And under his guidance I would contrive to make inthe furnace a charming little cocked hat of colored glass--a treasure!And the sheer joy thereof would wake me.

Sometimes the white-haired lady and I would sit together at a squarebox from which she made lovely music, and she would sing my favoritesong--a song that I adored. But I always woke before this song came toan end, on account of the too insupportably intense bliss I felt onhearing it; and all I could remember when awake were the words"triste--comment--sale." The air, which I knew so well in my dream, Icould not recall.

It seemed as though some innermost core of my being, some childish holyof holies, secreted a source of supersubtle reminiscence, which, undersome stimulus that now and again became active during sleep, exhaleditself in this singular dream--shadowy and slight, but invariablyaccompanied by a sense of felicity so measureless and so penetratingthat I would always wake in a mystic flutter of ecstasy, the bareremembrance of which was enough to bless and make happy many asucceeding hour.

* * * * *

Besides this happy family of three, close by (in the Street of theTower) lived my grandmother Mrs. Biddulph, and my Aunt Plunket, a widow,with her two sons, Alfred and Charlie, and her daughter Madge. They alsowere fair to look at--extremely so--of the gold-haired, white-skinned,well-grown Anglo-Saxon type, with frank, open, jolly manners, and nobeastly British pride.

So that physically, at least, we reflected much credit on the Englishname, which was not in good odor just then at Passy-lès-Paris, whereWaterloo was unforgotten. In time, however, our nationality was condonedon account of our good looks--"non Angli sed angeli!" as M. Saindou wasgallantly pleased to exclaim when he called (with a prospectus of hisschool) and found us all gathered together under the big apple-treeon our lawn.

But English beauty in Passy was soon to receive a memorable addition toits ranks in the person of a certain Madame Seraskier, who came with aninvalid little daughter to live in the house so modestly described ingold as "Parva sed Apta."

She was the English, or rather the Irish, wife of a Hungarian patriotand man of science, Dr. Seraskier (son of the famous violinist); anextremely tall, thin man, almost gigantic, with a grave, benevolentface, and a head like a prophet's; who was, like my father, very muchaway from his family--conspiring perhaps--or perhaps only inventing(like my father), and looking out "for his ship to come home!"

[Illustration: "SHE TOPPED MY TALL MOTHER."]

This fair lady's advent was a sensation--to me a sensation that neverpalled or wore itself away; it was no longer now "la belle MadamePasquier," but "la divine Madame Seraskier"--beauty-blind as the Frenchare apt to be.

She topped my tall mother by more than half a head; as was remarked byMadame Pelé, whose similes were all of the kitchen and dining-room,"elle lui mangerait des petits pâtés sur la tête!" And height, thatlends dignity to ugliness, magnifies beauty on a scale of geometricalprogression--2, 4, 8, 16, 32--for every consecutive inch, between fivefeet five, let us say, and five feet ten or eleven (or thereabouts),which I take to have been Madame Seraskier's measurement.

She had black hair and blue eyes--of the kind that turns violet in anovel--and a beautiful white skin, lovely hands and feet, a perfectfigure, and features chiselled and finished and polished and turned outwith such singular felicitousness that one gazed and gazed till theheart was full of a strange jealous resentment at any one else havingthe right to gaze on something so rare, so divinely, so sacredlyfair--any one in the world but one's self!

But a woman can be all this without being Madame Seraskier--she was muchmore.

For the warmth and genial kindness of her nature shone through her eyesand rang in her voice. All was of a piece with her--her simplicity, hergrace, her naturalness and absence of vanity; her courtesy, hersympathy, her mirthfulness.

I do not know which was the most irresistible: she had a slight Irishaccent when she spoke English, a less slight English accent when shespoke French!

I made it my business to acquire both.

Indeed, she was in heart and mind and body what we should _all_ be butfor the lack of a little public spirit and self-denial (under properguidance) during the last few hundred years on the part of a fewthousand millions of our improvident fellow-creatures.

There should be no available ugly frames for beautiful souls to behurried into by carelessness or mistake, and no ugly souls should besuffered to creep, like hermit-crabs, into beautiful shells neverintended for them. The outward and visible form should mark the inwardand spiritual grace; that it seldom does so is a fact there is nogainsaying. Alas! such beauty is such an exception that its possessor,like a prince of the blood royal, is pampered and spoiled from the verycradle, and every good and generous and unselfish impulse is corroded byadulation--that spontaneous tribute so lightly won, so quickly paid, andaccepted so royally as a due.

So that only when by Heaven's grace the very beautiful are also verygood, is it time for us to go down on our knees, and say our prayers inthankfulness and adoration; for the divine has been permitted to makeitself manifest for a while in the perishable likeness of ourpoor humanity.

A beautiful face! a beautiful tune! Earth holds nothing to beat these,and of such, for want of better materials, we have built for ourselvesthe kingdom of Heaven.

My mother soon became the passionately devoted friend of the divineMadame Seraskier; and I, what would I not have done--what danger would Inot have faced--what death would I not have died for her!

I did not die; I lived her protestant to be, for nearly fifty years. Fornearly fifty years to recollect the rapture and the pain it was to lookat her; that inexplicable longing ache, that dumb, delicious, complex,innocent distress, for which none but the greatest poets have ever foundexpression; and which, perhaps, they have not felt half so acutely,these glib and gifted ones, as _I_ did, at the susceptible age of seven,eight, nine, ten, eleven, and twelve.

She had other slaves of my sex. The five Napoleonic heroes did homageeach after his fashion: the good Major with a kind of sweet fatherlytenderness touching to behold; the others with perhaps less unselfishadoration; notably the brave Capitaine Audenis, of the fair waxedmustache and beautiful brown tail coat, so tightly buttoned with giltbuttons across his enormous chest, and imperceptible little feet sotightly imprisoned in shiny tipped female cloth boots, with buttons ofmother-of-pearl; whose hobby was, I believe, to try and compensatehimself for the misfortunes of war by more successful attempts inanother direction. Anyhow he betrayed a warmth that made my small bosoma Gehenna, until she laughed and snubbed him into due propriety andshamefaced self-effacement.

It soon became evident that she favored two, at least, out of all thislittle masculine world--the Major myself; and a strange trio we made.

Her poor little daughter, the object of her passionate solicitude, avery clever and precocious child, was the reverse of beautiful, althoughshe would have had fine eyes but for her red lashless lids. She wore herthick hair cropped short, like a boy, and was pasty and sallow incomplexion, hollow-cheeked, thick-featured, and overgrown, with longthin hands and feet, and arms and legs of quite pathetic length andtenuity; a silent and melancholy little girl, who sucked her thumbperpetually, and kept her own counsel. She would have to lie in bed fordays together, and when she got well enough to sit up, I (to please hermother) would read to her _Le Robinson Suisse_, _Sandford and Merton_,_Evenings at Home_, _Les Contes de Madame Perrault_, the shipwreck from"Don Juan," of which we never tired, and the "Giaour," the "Corsair,"and "Mazeppa"; and last, but not least, _Peter Parleys Natural History_,which we got to know by heart.

And out of this latter volume I would often declaim for her benefit whathas always been to me the most beautiful poem in the world, possiblybecause it was the first I read for myself, or else because it is sointimately associated with those happy days. Under an engraving of awild duck (after Bewick, I believe) were quoted W.C. Bryant's lines "Toa Water-fowl." They charmed me then and charm me now as nothing else hasquite charmed me; I become a child again as I think of them, with achild's virgin subtlety of perception and magical susceptibility tovague suggestions of the Infinite.

Poor little Mimsey Seraskier would listen with distended eyes and quickcomprehension. She had a strange fancy that a pair of invisible beings,"La fée Tarapatapoum," and "Le Prince Charmant" (two favorite charactersof M. le Major's) were always in attendance upon us--upon her andme--and were equally fond of us both; that is, "La fée Tarapatapoum" ofme, and "Le Prince Charmant" of her--and watched over us and wouldprotect us through life.

"O! ils sont joliment bien ensemble, tous les deux--ils sontinséparables!" she would often exclaim, _apropos_ of these visionarybeings; and _apropos_ of the water-fowl she would say--

And then I would copy Bewick's wood-cuts for her, as she sat on the armof my chair and patiently watched; and she would say: "La féeTarapatapoum trouve que tu dessines dans la perfection!" and treasure upthese little masterpieces--"pour l'album de la fée Tarapatapoum!"

[Illustration]

There was one drawing she prized above all others--a steel engravingin a volume of Byron, which represented two beautiful beings of eithersex, walking hand in hand through a dark cavern. The man was in sailor'sgarb; the lady, who went barefoot and lightly clad, held a torch; andunderneath was written--

_"And Neuha led her Torquil by the hand, And waved along the vaults her flaming brand."_

I spent hours in copying it for her, and she preferred the copy to theoriginal, and would have it that the two figures were excellentportraits of her Prince and Fairy.

Sometimes during these readings and sketchings under the apple-tree onthe lawn, the sleeping Médor (a huge nondescript sort of dog, built upof every breed in France, with the virtues of all and the vices of none)would wag his three inches of tail, and utter soft whimperings ofwelcome in his dream; and she would say--

"C'est le Prince Charmant qui lui dit; 'Médor donne la patte!'"

Or our old tomcat would rise from his slumbers with his tail up, and ruban imaginary skirt; and it was--

We mostly spoke French, in spite of strict injunctions to the contraryfrom our fathers and mothers, who were much concerned lest we shouldforget our English altogether.

In time we made a kind of ingenious compromise; for Mimsey, who wasfull of resource, invented a new language, or rather two, which wecalled Frankingle and Inglefrank, respectively. They consisted inanglicizing French nouns and verbs and then conjugating and pronouncingthem Englishly, or _vice versâ_.

For instance, it was very cold, and the school-room window was open, soshe would say in Frankingle--

With this contrivance we managed to puzzle and mystify the uninitiated,English and French alike. The intelligent reader, who sees it all inprint, will not be so easily taken in.

When Mimsey was well enough, she would come with my cousins and me intothe park, where we always had a good time--lying in ambush for redIndians, rescuing Madge Plunket from a caitiff knight, or else huntingsnakes and field-mice and lizards, and digging for lizard's eggs, whichwe would hatch at home--that happy refuge for all manner of beasts, aswell as little boys and girls. For there were squirrels, hedgehogs, andguinea-pigs; an owl, a raven, a monkey, and white mice; little birdsthat had strayed from the maternal nest before they could fly (theyalways died!), the dog Médor, and any other dog who chose; not tomention a gigantic rocking-horse made out of a real stuffed pony--thesmallest pony that had ever been!

Often our united high spirits were too boisterous for Mimsey. Dreadfulheadaches would come on, and she would sit in a corner, nursing ahedgehog with one arm and holding her thumb in her mouth with the other.Only when we were alone together was she happy, and then, _moulttristement!_

On summer evenings whole parties of us, grown-up and small, would walkthrough the park and the Bois de Boulogne to the "Mare d'Auteuil"; as wegot near enough for Médor to scent the water, he would bark and grin andgyrate, and go mad with excitement, for he had the gift of diving afterstones, and liked to show it off.

There we would catch huge olive-colored water-beetles, yellowunderneath; red-bellied newts; green frogs, with beautiful spots and asplendid parabolic leap; gold and silver fish, pied with purply brown. Imention them in the order of their attractiveness. The fish were tootame and easily caught, and their beauty of too civilized an order; therare, flat, vicious dytiscus "took the cake."

Sometimes, even, we would walk through Boulogne to St. Cloud, to see thenew railway and the trains--an inexhaustible subject of wonder anddelight--and eat ices at the "Tête Noire" (a hotel which had been thescene of a terrible murder, that led to a cause célèbre); and we wouldcome back through the scented night, while the glowworms were shining inthe grass, and the distant frogs were croaking in the Mare d'Auteuil.Now and then a startled roebuck would gallop in short bounds acrossthe path, from thicket to thicket, and Médor would go mad again and wakethe echoes of the new Paris fortification, which were still in thecourse of construction.

[Illustration]

He had not the gift of catching roebucks!

If my father were of the party, he would yodel Tyrolese melodies, andsing lovely songs of Boieldieu, Hérold, and Grétry; or "Drink to me onlywith thine eyes," or else the "Bay of Dublin" for Madame Seraskier, whohad the nostalgia of her beloved country whenever her belovedhusband was away.

Or else we would break out into a jolly chorus and march to the tune--

Or else, again, if it were too hot to sing, or we were too tired, M. leMajor, forsaking the realms of fairy-land, and uncovering his high baldhead as he walked, would gravely and reverently tell us of his greatmaster, of Brienne, of Marengo, and Austerlitz; of the farewells atFontainebleau, and the Hundred Days--never of St. Helena; he would nottrust himself to speak to us of that! And gradually working his way toWaterloo, he would put his hat on, and demonstrate to us, by A+B, how,virtually, the English had lost the day, and why and wherefore. And onall the little party a solemn, awe-struck stillness would fall as welistened, and on some of us the sweet nostalgia of bed!

Oh, the good old time!

The night was consecrated for me by the gleam and scent and rustle ofMadame Seraskier's gown, as I walked by her side in the deepening dusk--agleam of yellow, or pale blue, or white--a scent of sandalwood--a rustlethat told of a light, vigorous tread on firm, narrow, high-arched feet,that were not easily tired; of an anxious, motherly wish to get back toMimsey, who was not strong enough for these longer expeditions.

On the shorter ones I used sometimes to carry Mimsey on my back most ofthe way home (to please her mother)--a frail burden, with her poor,long, thin arms round my neck, and her pale, cold cheek against myear--she weighed nothing! And when I was tired M. le Major would relieveme, but not for long. She always wanted to be carried by Gogo (for so Iwas called, for no reason whatever, unless it was that my namewas Peter).

She would start at the pale birches that shone out against the gloom,and shiver if a bough scraped her, and tell me all about theErl-king--"mais comme ils sont là tous les deux" (meaning the Prince andthe Fairy) "il n'y a absolument rien à craindre."

And Mimsey was _si bonne camarade_, in spite of her solemnity and poorhealth and many pains, so grateful for small kindnesses, so appreciativeof small talents, so indulgent to small vanities (of which she seemed tohave no more share than her mother), and so deeply humorous in spite ofher eternal gravity--for she was a real tomboy at heart--that I sooncarried her, not only to please her mother, but to please herself, andwould have done anything for her.

As for M. le Major, he gradually discovered that Mimsey was half amartyr and half a saint, and possessed all the virtues under the sun.

_L'art d'être grandpère!_ This weather-beaten, war-battered old soldierhad learned it, without ever having had either a son or a daughter ofhis own. He was a _born_ grandfather!

Moreover, Mimsey and I had many tastes and passions in common--music,for instance, as well as Bewick's wood-cuts and Byron's poetry, androast chestnuts and domestic pets; and above all, the Mare d'Auteuil,which she preferred in the autumn, when the brown and yellow leaves wereeddying and scampering and chasing each other round its margin, ordrifting on its troubled surface, and the cold wet wind piped throughthe dishevelled boughs of the forest, under the leaden sky.

She said it was good to be there then, and think of home and thefireside; and better still, when home was reached at last, to think ofthe desolate pond we had left; and good, indeed, it was to trudge homeby wood and park and avenue at dusk, when the bats were about, withAlfred and Charlie and Mimsey and Madge and Médor; swishing our waythrough the lush, dead leaves, scattering the beautiful, ripehorse-chestnut out of its split creamy case, or picking up acorns andbeechnuts here and there as we went.

And, once home, it was good, very good, to think how dark and lonesomeand shivery it must be out there by the _mare_, as we squatted andchatted and roasted chestnuts by the wood fire in the school-room beforethe candles were lit--_entre chien et loup_, as was called the Frenchgloaming--while Thérèse was laying the tea-things, and telling us thenews, and cutting bread and butter; and my mother played the harp in thedrawing-room above; till the last red streak died out of the wet westbehind the swaying tree-tops, and the curtains were drawn, and there waslight, and the appetites were let loose.

I love to sit here, in my solitude and captivity, and recall everyincident of that sweet epoch--to ache with the pangs of happyremembrance; than which, for the likes of me, great poets tell us thereis no greater grief. This sorrow's crown of sorrow is my joy and myconsolation, and ever has been; and I would not exchange it for youth,health, wealth, honor, and freedom; only for thrice happy childhooditself once more, over and over again, would I give up its thrice happyrecollections.

That it should not be all beer and skittles with us, and therefore aptto pall, my cousins and I had to work pretty hard. In the first place,my dear mother did all she could to make me an infant prodigy oflearning. She tried to teach me Italian, which she spoke as fluently asEnglish or French (for she had lived much in Italy), and I had totranslate the "Gierusalemme Liberata" into both those latterlanguages--a task which has remained unfinished--and to render the"Allegro" and the "Penseroso" into Miltonian French prose, and "Le Cid"into Corneillian English. Then there were Pinnock's histories of Greeceand Rome to master, and, of course, the Bible; and, every Sunday, theCollect, the Gospel, and the Epistle to get by heart. No, it was not allbeer and skittles.

It was her pleasure to teach, but, alas! not mine to learn; and we costeach other many a sigh, but loved each other all the more, perhaps.

Then we went in the mornings, my cousins and I, to M. Saindou's,opposite, that we might learn French grammar and French-Latin andFrench-Greek. But on three afternoons out of the weekly six Mr. Slade, aCambridge sizar stranded in Paris, came to anglicize (and neutralize)the Latin and Greek we had learned in the morning, and to show us whatsorry stuff the French had made of them and of their quantities.

Perhaps the Greek and Latin quantities are a luxury of English growth--amere social test--a little pitfall of our own invention, like the letter_h_, for the tripping up of unwary pretenders; or else, Frencheducation being so deplorably cheap in those days, the school-mastersthere could not afford to take such fanciful superfluities intoconsideration; it was not to be done at the price.

In France, be it remembered, the King and his greengrocer sent theirsons to the same school (which did not happen to be M. Saindou's, by theway, where it was nearly all greengrocer and no King); and the fee forbed, board, and tuition, in all public schools alike, was something likethirty pounds a year.

The Latin, in consequence, was without the distinction that comes ofexclusiveness, and quite lacked that aristocratic flavor, so gratefuland comforting to scholar and ignoramus alike, which the costly Britishpublic-school system (and the British accent) alone can impart to a deadlanguage. When French is dead we shall lend it a grace it never hadbefore; some of us even manage to do so already.

That is (no doubt) why the best French writers so seldom point theirmorals and adorn their tales, as ours do, with the usual pretty,familiar, and appropriate lines out of Horace or Virgil; and why Latinis so little quoted in French talk, except here and there by a wearyshop-walker, who sighs--

"Varium et mutabile semper femina!" as he rolls up the unsold silk; orexclaims, "O rus! quando te aspiciam!" as he takes his railway ticketfor Asnières on the first fine Sunday morning in spring.

But this is a digression, and we have wandered far away from Mr. Slade.

Good old Slade!

We used to sit on the tone posts outside the avenue gate and watch forhis appearance at a certain distant corner of the winding street.

With his green tail coat, his stiff shirt collar, his flat thumbs stuckin the armholes of his nankeen waistcoat, his long flat feet turnedinward, his reddish mutton-chop whiskers his hat on the back of hishead, and his clean, fresh, blooming, virtuous, English face--the sight ofhim was not sympathetic when he appeared at last.

[Illustration: "GOOD OLD SLADE"]

Occasionally, in the course of his tuition, illness or domestic affairswould, to his great regret, detain him from our midst, and the beatitudewe would experience when the conviction gradually dawned upon us thatwe were watching for him in vain was too deep for either words or deedsor outward demonstration of any sort. It was enough to sit on our stoneposts and let it steal over us by degrees.

These beatitudes were few and far between. It would be infelicitous,perhaps, to compare the occasional absences of a highly respectableEnglish tutor to an angel's visits, but so we felt them.

And then he would make up for it next afternoon, that conscientiousEnglishman; which was fair enough to our parents, but not to us. Andthen what extra severity, as interest for the beggarly loan of half anafternoon! What rappings on ink-stained knuckles with a beastly, hard,round, polished, heavy-wooded, business-like English ruler!

It was our way in those days to think that everything English wasbeastly--an expression our parents thought we were much too fondof using.

But perhaps we were not without some excuse for this unpardonablesentiment. For there was _another_ English family in Passy--thePrendergasts, an older family than ours--that is, the parents (anduncles and aunts) were middle-aged, the grandmother dead, and thechildren grown up. We had not the honor of their acquaintance. Butwhether that was their misfortune and our fault (or _vice versâ_) Icannot tell. Let us hope the former.

They were of an opposite type to ours, and, though I say it, their typewas a singularly unattractive one; perhaps it may have been the originalof those caricatures of our compatriots by which French comic artistshave sought to avenge Waterloo. It was stiff, haughty, contemptuous. Ithad prominent front teeth, a high nose, a long upper lip, a recedingjaw; it had dull, cold, stupid, selfish green eyes, like a pike's, thatswerved neither to right nor left, but looked steadily over peoples'heads as it stalked along in its pride of impeccable Britishself-righteousness.

At the sudden sight of it (especially on Sundays) all the cardinalvirtues became hateful on the spot and respectability a thing to runaway from. Even that smooth, close-shaven cleanliness was soPuritanically aggressive as to make one abhor the very idea of soap.

Its accent, when it spoke French (in shops), instead of being musicaland sweet and sympathetic, like Madame Seraskier's, was barbarous andgrotesque, with dreadful "ongs," and "angs," and "ows," and "ays"; andits manner overbearing, suspicious, and disdainful; and then we couldhear its loud, insolent English asides; and though it was tall andstraight and not outwardly deformed, it looked such a kill-joy skeletonat a feast, such a portentous carnival mask of solemn emptiness, such adreary, doleful, unfunny figure of fun, that one felt Waterloo mightsome day be forgiven, even in Passy; but the Prendergasts, _never_!

I have lived so long away from the world that, for all I know, thisancient British type, this "grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt, and ominousbird of yore," may have become extinct, like another, but lessunprepossessing bird--the dodo; whereby our state is the more gracious.

But in those days, and generalizing somewhat hastily as young peopleare apt to do, we grew to think that England must be full ofPrendergasts, and did not want to go there.

To this universal English beastliness of things we made a fewexceptions, it is true, but the list was not long: tea, mustard,pickles, gingerbread-nuts, and, of all things in the world, the Englishloaf of household bread that came to us once a week as a great treat andrecompense for our virtues, and harmonized so well with Passy butter. Itwas too delicious! But there was always a difficulty, a dilemma--whetherto eat it with butter alone, or with "cassonade" (French brownsugar) added.

Mimsey knew her own mind, and loved it with French brown sugar, and ifshe were not there I would save for her half of my slices, and carefullycassonade them for her myself.

On the other hand, we thought everything French the reverse ofbeastly--except all the French boys we knew, and at M. Saindou's therewere about two hundred; then there were all the boys in Passy (whosename was legion, and who _did not_ go to M. Saindou's), and we knew allthe boys in Passy. So that we were not utterly bereft of material forgood, stodgy, crusty, patriotic English prejudice.

Nor did the French boys fail to think us beastly in return, andsometimes to express the thought; especially the little vulgar boys,whose playground was the street--the _voyous de Passy_. They hated ourwhite silk chimney-pot hats and large collars and Eton jackets, andcalled us "sacred godems," as their ancestors used to call ours in thedays of Joan of Arc. Sometimes they would throw stones, and then therewere collisions, and bleedings of impertinent little French noses, andrunnings away of cowardly little French legs, and dreadful wails of "Olà, là! O, là, là--maman!" when they were overtaken by English ones.

Not but what _our_ noses were made to bleed now and then,unvictoriously, by a certain blacksmith--always the same youngblacksmith--Boitard!

It is always a young blacksmith who does these things--or a youngbutcher.

Of course, for the honor of Great Britain, one of us finally licked himto such a tune that he has never been able to hold up his head since. Itwas about a cat. It came off at dusk, one Christmas Eve, on the "Isle ofSwans," between Passy and Grenelle (too late to save the cat).

I was the hero of this battle. "It's now or never," I thought, and sawscarlet, and went for my foe like a maniac. The ring was kept by Alfredand Charlie helped, oddly enough, by a couple of male Prendergasts, whoso far forgot themselves as to take an interest in the proceedings.Madge and Mimsey looked on, terrified and charmed.

It did not last long, and was worthy of being described by Homer, oreven in _Bell's Life_. That is one of the reasons why I will notdescribe it. The two Prendergasts seemed to enjoy it very much while itlasted, and when it was over they remembered themselves again, and saidnothing, and stalked away.

As we grew older and wiser we had permission to extend our explorationsto Meudon, Versailles, St. Germain, and other delightful places; to ridethither on hired horses, after having duly learned to ride at the famous"School of Equitation," in the Rue Duphot.

[Illustration: "OMINOUS BIRDS OF YORE."]

Also, we swam in those delightful summer baths in the Seine, that are somajestically called "Schools of Natation," and became past masters in"la coupe" (a stroke no other Englishman but ourselves has ever beenquite able to manage), and in all the different delicate "nuances" ofheader-taking--"la coulante," "la hussarde," "la tête-bêche," "la toutce que vous voudrez."

Also, we made ourselves at home in Paris, especially old Paris.

For instance, there was the island of St. Louis, with its stately oldmansions _entre cour et jardin,_ behind grim stone portals and highwalls where great magistrates and lawyers dwelt in dignifiedseclusion--the nobles of the rove: but where once had dwelt, in daysgone by, the greater nobles of the sword-crusaders, perhaps, and knightstemplars, like Brian de Bois Guilbert.

And that other more famous island, la Cité, where Paris itself was born,where Notre Dame reared its twin towers above the melancholy, gray,leprous walls and dirty brown roofs of the Hôtel-Dieu.

Pathetic little tumble down old houses, all out of drawing andperspective, nestled like old spiders' webs between the buttresses ofthe great cathedral and on two sides of the little square in front (thePlace du Parvis Notre Dame) stood ancient stone dwellings, with highslate roofs and elaborately wrought iron balconies. They seemed to havesuch romantic histories that I never tired of gazing at them, andwondering what the histories could be; and now I think of it, one ofthese very dwellings must have been the Hôtel de Gondelaurier, where,according to the most veracious historian that ever was, poor Esmeraldaonce danced and played the tambourine to divert the fair damselFleur-de-Lys de Gondelaurier and her noble friends, all of whom she sotranscended in beauty, purity, goodness, and breeding (although she wasbut an untaught, wandering gypsy girl, out of the gutter); and there,before them all and the gay archer, she was betrayed to her finalundoing by her goat, whom she had so imprudently taught how to spellthe beloved name of "Phébus."

Close by was the Morgue, that grewsome building which the great etcherMéryon has managed to invest with some weird fascination akin to that ithad for me in those days--and has now, as I see it with the charmedeyes of Memory.

La Morgue! what a fatal twang there is about the very name!

[Illustration: SETTLING AN OLD SCORE.]

After gazing one's fill at the horrors within (as became ahealthy-minded English boy) it was but a step to the equestrian statueof Henri Quatre, on the Pont-Neuf (the oldest bridge in Paris, by theway); there, astride his long-tailed charger, he smiled, _le roy vert etgalant,_ just midway between either bank of the historic river, justwhere it was most historic; and turned his back on the Paris of theBourgeois King with the pear-shaped face and the mutton-chop whiskers.

And there one stood, spellbound in indecision, like the ass of Buridanbetween two sacks of oats; for on either side, north or south of thePont-Neuf, were to be found enchanting slums, all more attractive theones than the others, winding up and down hill and roundabout and in andout, like haunting illustrations by Gustave Doré to _Drolatick Tales_ byBalzac (not seen or read by me till many years later, I beg to say).

Dark, narrow, silent, deserted streets that would turn up afterwards inmany a nightmare--with the gutter in the middle and towerlets and stoneposts all along the sides; and high fantastic walls (where it was_défendre d'afficher_), with bits of old battlement at the top, andoverhanging boughs of sycamore and lime, and behind them gray oldgardens that dated from the days of Louis le Hutin and beyond! Andsuggestive names printed in old rusty iron letters at the streetcorners--"Rue Videgousset," "Rue Coupe-gorge," "Rue de la VieilleTruanderie," "Impasse de la Tour de Nesle," etc., that appealed to theimagination like a chapter from Hugo or Dumas.

And the way to these was by long, tortuous, busy thoroughfares, mostirregularly flagged, and all alive with strange, delightful people inblue blouses, brown woollen tricots, wooden shoes, red and white cottonnightcaps, rags and patches; most graceful girls, with pretty,self-respecting feet, and flashing eyes, and no head-dress but their ownhair; gay, fat hags, all smile; thin hags, with faces of appallingwickedness or misery; precociously witty little gutter-imps of eithersex; and such cripples! jovial hunchbacks, lusty blind beggars, merrycreeping paralytics, scrofulous wretches who joked and punned abouttheir sores; light-hearted, genial, mendicant monsters without arms orlegs, who went ramping through the mud on their bellies from oneunderground wine-shop to another; and blue-chinned priests andbarefooted brown monks and demure Sisters of Charity, and here and therea jolly chiffonnier with his hook, and his knap-basket behind; or acuirassier, or a gigantic carbineer, or gay little "Hunter of Africa,"or a couple of bold gendarmes riding abreast, with their towering black_bonnets à poil;_ or a pair of pathetic little red-legged soldiers,conscripts just fresh from the country, with innocent light eyes andstraw-coloured hair and freckled brown faces, walking hand in hand, andstaring at all the pork-butchers' shops--and sometimes at thepork-butcher's wife!

Then a proletarian wedding procession--headed by the bride andbridegroom, an ungainly pair in their Sunday best--all singing noisilytogether. Then a pauper funeral, or a covered stretcher, followed bysympathetic eyes on its way to the Hôtel-Dieu; or the last sacrament,with bell and candle, bound for the bedside of some humble agonizer _inextremis_--and we all uncovered as it went by.

And then, for a running accompaniment of sound the clanging chimes, theitinerant street cries, the tinkle of the _marchand de coco,_ the drum,the _cor de chasse,_ the organ of Barbary, the ubiquitous pet parrot,the knife-grinder, the bawling fried-potato monger, and, most amusing ofall, the poodle-clipper and his son, strophe and antistrophe, for everyminute the little boy would yell out in his shrill treble that "hisfather clipped poodles for thirty sous, and was competent also toundertake the management of refractory tomcats," upon which the fatherwould growl in his solemn bass, "My son speaks the truth"--_L'enfantdit vrai!_

And rising above the general cacophony the din of the eternally crackingwhip, of the heavy carwheel jolting over the uneven stones, the stampand neigh of the spirited little French cart-horse and the music of hismany bells, and the cursing and swearing and _hue! dià!_ of his driver!It was all entrancing.

Thence home--to quite, innocent, suburban Passy--by the quays, walkingon the top of the stone parapet all the way, so as to miss nothing (tilla gendarme was in sight), or else by the Boulevards, the Rue de Rivoli,the Champs Élysées, the Avenue de St. Cloud, and the Chaussée de laMuette. What a beautiful walk! Is there another like it anywhere as itwas then, in the sweet early forties of this worn-out old century, andbefore this poor scribe had reached his teens?

Ah! it is something to have known that Paris, which lay at one's feet asone gazed from the heights of Passy, with all its pinnacles and spiresand gorgeously-gilded domes, its Arch of Triumph, its Elysian Fields,its Field of Mars, its Towers of our Lady, its far-off Column of July,its Invalids, and Vale of Grace, and Magdalen, and Place of the Concord,where the obelisk reared its exotic peak by the beautiful unforgettablefountains.

There flowed the many-bridged winding river, always the same way, unlikeour tidal Thames, and always full; just beyond it was spread thatstately, exclusive suburb, the despair of the newly rich and recentlyennobled, where almost every other house bore a name which read like apage of French history; and farther still the merry, wicked Latinquarter and the grave Sorbonne, the Pantheon, the Garden of Plants; onthe hither side, in the middle distance, the Louvre, where the kings ofFrance had dwelt for centuries; the Tuileries, where "the King of theFrench" dwelt then, and just for a little while yet.

Well I knew and loved it all; and most of all I loved it when the sunwas setting at my back, and innumerable distant windows reflected theblood-red western flame. It seemed as though half Paris were on fire,with the cold blue east for a background.

Dear Paris!

Yes, it is something to have roamed over it as a small boy--a smallEnglish boy (that is, a small boy unattended by his mother or hisnurse), curious, inquisitive, and indefatigable; full of imagination;all his senses keen with the keenness that belongs to the morning oflife: the sight of a hawk, the hearing of a bat, almost the scent ofa hound.

Indeed, it required a nose both subtle and unprejudiced to understandand appreciate and thoroughly enjoy that Paris--not the Paris of M. leBaron Haussmann, lighted by gas and electricity, and flushed and drainedby modern science; but the "good old Paris" of Balzac and Eugène Sue and_Les Mystères_--the Paris of dim oil-lanterns suspended from irongibbets (where once aristocrats had been hung); of water-carriers whosold water from their hand-carts, and delivered it at your door (_aucinquème_) for a penny a pail--to drink of, and wash in, and cookwith, and all.

There were whole streets--and these by no means the least fascinatingand romantic--where the unwritten domestic records of every house wereafloat in the air outside it--records not all savory or sweet, butalways full of interest and charm!

One knew at a sniff as one passed the _porte cochère_ what kind ofpeople lived behind and above; what they ate and what they drank, andwhat their trade was; whether they did their washing at home, and burnedtallow or wax, and mixed chicory with their coffee, and were over-fondof Gruyère cheese--the biggest, cheapest, plainest, and most formidablecheese in the world; whether they fried with oil or butter, and likedtheir omelets overdone and garlic in their salad, and sippedblack-currant brandy or anisette as a liqueur; and were overrun withmice, and used cats or mouse-traps to get rid of them, or neither; andbought violets, or pinks, or gillyflowers in season, and kept them toolong; and fasted on Friday with red or white beans, or lentils, or had adispensation from the Pope--or, haply, even dispensed with the Pope'sdispensation.

For of such a telltale kind were the overtones in that complex, odorousclang.

I will not define its fundamental note--ever there, ever the same; bigwith a warning of quick-coming woe to many households; whose unheededwaves, slow but sure, and ominous as those that rolled on greatoccasions from le Bourdon de Notre Dame (the Big Ben of Paris), droveall over the gay city and beyond, night and day--penetrating everycorner, overflowing the most secret recesses, drowning the very incenseby the altar-steps.

And here, as I write, the faint, scarcely perceptible, ghost-likesuspicion of a scent--a mere nostalgic fancy, compound, generic,synthetic and all-embracing--an abstract olfactory symbol of the "ToutParis" of fifty years ago, comes back to me out of the past; and fainwould I inhale it in all its pristine fulness and vigour. For scents,like musical sounds, are rare sublimaters of the essence of memory (thisis a prodigious fine phrase--I hope it means something), and scentsneed not be seductive in themselves to recall the seductions of scenesand days gone by.

Alas! scents cannot be revived at will, like an

"_Air doux et tendre Jadis aimé_!"

Oh, that I could hum or whistle an old French smell! I could evoke allParis, sweet, prae-imperial Paris, in a single whiff!

* * * * *

In such fashion did we three small boys, like the three musketeers (thefame of whose exploits was then filling all France), gather and pile upsweet memories, to chew the cud thereof in after years, when far awayand apart.

Of all that _bande joyeuse_--old and young and middle-aged, from M. leMajor to Mimsey Seraskier--all are now dead but me--all except dearMadge, who was so pretty and light-hearted; and I have never seenher since.

* * * * *

Thus have I tried, with as much haste as I could command (being one ofthe plodding sort) to sketch that happy time, which came to an endsuddenly and most tragically when I was twelve years old.

My dear and jovial happy-go-lucky father was killed in a minute by theexplosion of a safety lamp of his own invention, which was to havesuperseded Sir Humphry Davy's, and made our fortune! What a brutalirony of fate.

So sanguine was he of success, so confident that his ship had come homeat last, that he had been in treaty for a nice little old manor in Anjou(with a nice little old castle to match), called la Marière, which hadbelonged to his ancestors, and from which we took our name (for we werePasquier de la Marière, of quite a good old family); and there we wereto live on our own land, as _gentilshommes campagnards_, and be Frenchfor evermore, under a paternal, pear-faced bourgeois king as a temporary_pis-aller_ until Henri Cinq, Comte de Chambord, should come to his ownagain, and make us counts and barons and peers of France--Heavenknows what for!

My mother, who was beside herself with grief, went over to London, wherethis miserable accident had occurred, and had barely arrived there whenshe was delivered of a still-born child, and died almost immediately;and I became an orphan in less than a week, and a penniless one. For itturned out that my father had by this time spent every penny of his ownand my mother's capital, and had, moreover, died deeply in debt. I wastoo young and too grief-stricken to feel anything but the terriblebereavement, but it soon became patent to me that an immense alterationwas to be made in my mode of life.

A relative of my mother's, Colonel Ibbetson (who was well off) came toPassy to do his best for me, and pay what debts had been incurred in theneighborhood, and settle my miserable affairs.

After a while it was decided by him and the rest of the family that Ishould go back with him to London, there to be disposed of for thebest, according to his lights.

And on a beautiful June Morning, redolent of lilac and syringa, gay withdragon-flies and butterflies and bumblebees, my happy childhood ended asit had begun. My farewells were heartrending (to me), but showed that Icould inspire affection as well as feel it, and that was somecompensation for my woe.

Madame Seraskier strained me to her kind heart, and blessed and kissedme again and again, and rained her warm tears on my face; and hers wasthe last figure I saw as our fly turned into the Rue de la Tour on ourway to London, Colonel Ibbetson exclaiming--

"Gad! who's the lovely young giantess that seems so fond of you, youlittle rascal, hey? By George! you young Don Giovanni, I'd have givensomething to be in your place! And who's that nice old man with the longgreen coat and the red ribbon? A _vieille moustache_, I suppose: almostlike a gentleman. Precious few Frenchmen can do that!"

Such was Colonel Ibbetson.

And then and there, even as he spoke, a little drop of sullen, chilldislike to my guardian and benefactor, distilled from his voice, hisaspect, the expression of his face, and his way of saying things,suddenly trickled into my consciousness--never to be whiped away!

As for so poor Mimsey, her grief was so overwhelming that she could notcome out and wish me goodbye like the others; and it led, as Iafterwards heard, to a long illness, the worst she ever had; and whenshe recovered it was to find that her beautiful mother was no more.

[Illustration:]

Madame Seraskier died of the cholera, and so did le Père et la MèreFrançois, and Madame Pelé, and one of the Napoleonic prisoners (not M.le Major), and several other people we had known, including a servant ofour own, Thérèse, the devoted Thérèse, to whom we were all devoted inreturn. That malodorous tocsin, which I have compared to the big bell ofNotre Dame, had warned, and warned, and warned in vain.

The _maison de santé_ was broken up. M. le Major and his friends wentand roosted on parole elsewhere, until a good time arrived for them,when their lost leader came back and remained--first as President of theFrench Republic, then as Emperor of the French themselves. No moreparole was needed after that.

My grandmother and Aunt Plunket and her children fled in terror toTours, and Mimsey went to Russia with her father.

Thus miserably ended that too happy septennate, and so no more atpresent of

"_Le joli lieu de ma naissance_!"

Part Two

The next decade of my outer life is so uninteresting, even to myself,that I will hurry through it as fast as I can. It will prove dullreading, I fear.

[Illustration:]

My Uncle Ibbetson (as I now called him) took to me and arranged toeducate and start me in life, and make "a gentleman" of me--an "Englishgentleman." But I had to change my name and adopt his; for some reason Idid not know, he seemed to hate my father's very name. Perhaps it wasbecause he had injured my father through life in many ways, and myfather had always forgiven him; a very good reason! Perhaps it wasbecause he had proposed to my mother three times when she was a girl,and had been thrice refused! (After the third time, he went to India forseven years, and just before his departure my father and mother weremarried, and a year after that I was born.)

So Pierre Pasquier de la Marière, _alias_ Monsieur Gogo, became MasterPeter Ibbetson, and went to Bluefriars, the gray-coat school, where hespent six years--an important slice out of a man's life, especiallyat that age.

I hated the garb, I hated the surroundings--the big hospital at theback, and that reek of cruelty, drunkenness, and filth, thecattle-market--where every other building was either a slaughter-house,a gin-palace, or a pawnbroker's shop, more than all I hated the gloomyjail opposite, where they sometimes hanged a man in public on a Mondaymorning. This dismal prison haunted my dreams when I wanted to dream ofPassy, of my dear dead father and mother and Madame Seraskier.

For the first term or two they were ever in my thoughts, and I wasalways trying to draw their profiles on desks and slates and copybooks,till at last all resemblance seemed to fade out of them; and then I drewM. le Major till his side face became quite demoralized and impossible,and ceased to be like anything in life. Then I fell back on others: lePère François, with his eternal _bonnet de colon_ and sabots stuffedwith straw; the dog Médor, the rocking-horse, and all the rest of themenagerie; the diligence that brought me away from Paris; the heavilyjack-booted couriers in shiny hats and pigtails, and white breeches, andshort-tailed blue coats covered with silver buttons, who used to ridethrough Passy, on their way to and fro between the Tuileries and St.Cloud, on little, neighing, gray stallions with bells round their necksand tucked-up tails, and beautiful heads like the horses' heads in theElgin Marbles.

In my sketches they always looked and walked and trotted the same way:to the left, or westward as it would be on the map. M. le Major, MadameSeraskier, Médor, the diligences and couriers, were all bound westwardby common consent--all going to London, I suppose, to look after me, whowas so dotingly fond of them.

Some of the boys used to admire these sketches and preserve them--someof the bigger boys would value my idealized (!) profiles of MadameSeraskier, with eyelashes quite an inch in length, and an eye threetimes the size of her mouth; and thus I made myself an artisticreputation for a while. But it did not last long, for my vein waslimited; and soon another boy came to the school, who surpassed me invariety and interest of subject, and could draw profiles looking eitherway with equal ease; he is now a famous Academician, and seems to havepreserved much of his old facility.[A]

[Footnote A: _Note_.--I have here omitted several pages, containing adescription in detail of my cousin's life "at Bluefriars"; and also theportraits (not always flattering) which he has written of masters andboys, many of whom are still alive, and some of whom have risen todistinction; but these sketches would be without special interest unlessthe names were given as well, and that would be unadvisable for manyreasons. Moreover, there is not much in what I have left out that hasany bearing on his subsequent life, or the development of his character.MADGE PLUNKET.]

* * * * *

Thus, on the whole, my school career was neither happy nor unhappy, nordid I distinguish myself in any way, nor (though I think I was ratherliked than otherwise) make any great or lasting friendships; on theother hand. I did not in any way disgrace myself, nor make a singleenemy that I knew of. Except that I grew our of the common tall andvery strong, a more commonplace boy than I must have seemed (after myartistic vein gad run itself dry) never went to a public school. So muchfor my outer life at Bluefriars.

[Illustration: A DREAM OF CHIVALRY]

But I had an inner world of my own, whose capital was Passy, whose faunaand flora were not to be surpassed by anything in Regent's Park or theZoological Gardens.

It was good to think of it by day, to dream of it by night, _although Ihad not yet learned how to dream!_

There were soon other and less exclusive regions, however, which Ishared with other boys of that bygone day. Regions of freedom anddelight, where I heard the ominous crack of Deerslayer's rifle, and wasfriends with Chingachgook and his noble son--the last, alas! of theMohicans: where Robin Hood and Friar Tuck made merry, and exchangedbuffets with Lion-hearted Richard under the green-wood tree: whereQuentin Durward, happy squire of dames, rode midnightly by their sidethrough the gibbet-and-gipsy-haunted forests of Touraine.... Ah! I hadmy dream of chivalry!

Happy times and climes! One must be a gray-coated school-boy, in theheart of foggy London, to know that nostalgia.

Not, indeed, but what London has its merits. Sam Weller lived there, andCharley Bates, and the irresistible Artful Dodger--and Dick Swiveller,and his adorable Marchioness, who divided my allegiance with Rebecca ofYork and sweet Diana Vernon.

It was good to be an English boy in those days, and care for suchfriends as these! But it was good to be a French boy also; to have knownParis, to possess the true French feel of things--and the language.

Indeed, bilingual boys--boys double-tongued from their very birth(especially in French and English)--enjoy certain rare privileges. It isnot a bad thing for a school-boy (since a school-boy he must be) to hailfrom two mother-countries if he can, and revel now and then in thesweets of homesickness for that of his two mother-countries in which hedoes not happen to be; and read _Les Trois Mousquetaires_ in thecloisters of Bluefriars, or _Ivanhoe_ in the dull, dusty prison-yardthat serves for a playground in so many a French _lycée_!

Without listening, he hears all round him the stodgy language of everyday, and the blatant shouts of his school-fellows, in the voices heknows so painfully well--those shrill trebles, those cracked barytonesand frog-like early basses! There they go, bleating and croaking andyelling; Dick, Tom, and Harry, or Jules, Hector, and Alphonse! Howvaguely tiresome and trivial and commonplace they are--those toofamiliar sounds; yet what an additional charm they lend to that soutterly different but equally familiar word-stream that comes silentlyflowing into his consciousness through his rapt eyes! The luxurioussense of mental exclusiveness and self-sequestration is made doublycomplete by the contrast!

And for this strange enchantment to be well and thoroughly felt, bothhis languages must be native; not acquired, however perfectly. Everysingle word must have its roots deep down in a personal past so remotefor him as to be almost unremembered; the very sound and printed aspectof each must be rich in childish memories of home; in all the countless,nameless, priceless associations that make it sweet and fresh andstrong, and racy of the soil.

Oh! Porthos, Athos, and D'Artagnan--how I loved you, and your immortalsquires, Planchet, Grimaud, Mousqueton! How well and wittily you spokethe language I adored--better even than good Monsieur Lallemand, theFrench master at Bluefriars, who could wield the most irregularsubjunctives as if they had been mere feathers--trifles light as air.

Then came the Count of Monte-Cristo, who taught me (only too well) histerrible lesson of hatred and revenge; and _Les Mystères de Paris, LeJuif Errant_, and others.

But no words that I can think of in either mother-tongue can expresswhat I felt when first, through these tear-dimmed eyes of mine, and deepinto my harrowed soul, came silently flowing the never-to-be-forgottenhistory of poor Esmeralda,[A] my first love! whose cruel fate filledwith pity, sorrow, and indignation the last term of my life at school.It was the most important, the most solemn, the most epoch-making eventof my school life. I read it, reread it, and read it again. I have notbeen able to read it since; it is rather long! but how well I rememberit, and how short it seemed then! and oh! how short thosewell-spent hours!

[Footnote A: Notre Dame de Paris, par Victor Hugo.]

That mystic word [Greek: Anagkae]! I wrote it on the flyleaf of all mybooks. I carved it on my desk. I intoned it in the echoing cloisters! Ivowed I would make a pilgrimage to Notre Dame some day, that I mighthunt for it in every hole and corner there, and read it with my owneyes, and feel it with my own forefinger.

And then that terrible prophetic song the old hag sings in the darkslum--how it haunted me, too! I could not shake it out of my troubledconsciousness for months:

_Grouille, grève, grève, grouille, File, File, ma quenouille:_

_File sa corde au bourreau Qui siffle dans le préau.

[Greek:"'Anagkae!'Anagkae!'Anagkae_!"]

Yes; it was worth while having been a little French boy just for a fewyears.

I especially found it so during the holidays, which I regularly spent atBluefriars; for there was a French circulating library in Holborn, closeby--a paradise. It was kept by a delightful old French lady who had seenbetter days, and was very kind to me, and did not lend me all the booksI asked for!

Thus irresistibly beguiled by these light wizards of our degenerate age,I dreamed away most of my school life, utterly deaf to the voices of theolder enchanters--Homer, Horace, Virgil--whom I was sent to school onpurpose to make friends with; a deafness I lived to deplore, like otherdunces, when it was too late.

* * * * *

And I was not only given to dream by day--I dreamed by night; my sleepwas full of dreams--terrible nightmares, exquisite visions, strangescenes full of inexplicable reminiscence; all vague and incoherent, likeall men's dreams that have hitherto been; _for I had not yet learned howto dream_.

A vast world, a dread and beautiful chaos, an ever-changing kaleidoscopeof life, too shadowy and dim to leave any lasting impression on thebusy, waking mind; with here and there more vivid images of terror ordelight, that one remembered for a few hours with a strange wonder andquestioning, as Coleridge remembered his Abyssinian maid who playedupon the dulcimer (a charming and most original combination).

The whole cosmos is in a man's brains--as much of it, at least, as aman's brains will hold; perhaps it is nowhere else. And when sleeprelaxes the will, and there are no earthly surroundings to distractattention--no duty, pain, or pleasure to compel it--riderless Fancytakes the bit in its teeth, and the whole cosmos goes mad and has itswild will of us.

[Illustration: "NOTRE DAME DE PARIS."]

Ineffable false joys, unspeakable false terror and distress, strangephantoms only seen as in a glass darkly, chase each other without rhymeor reason, and play hide-and-seek across the twilit field and throughthe dark recesses of our clouded and imperfect consciousness.

And the false terrors and distress, however unspeakable, are no worsethan such real terrors and distress as are only too often the waking lotof man, or even so bad; but the ineffable false joys transcend allpossible human felicity while they last, and a little while it is! Wewake, and wonder, and recall the slight foundation on which suchultra-human bliss has seemed to rest. What matters the foundation if butthe bliss be there, and the brain has nerves to feel it?

Poor human nature, so richly endowed with nerves of anguish, sosplendidly organized for pain and sorrow, is but slenderly equippedfor joy.

What hells have we not invented for the afterlife! Indeed, what hells wehave often made of this, both for ourselves and others, and at reallysuch a very small cost of ingenuity, after all!

Perhaps the biggest and most benighted fools have been the besthell-makers.

Whereas the best of our heavens is but a poor perfunctory conception,for all that the highest and cleverest among us have done their veryutmost to decorate and embellish it, and make life there seem worthliving. So impossible it is to imagine or invent beyond the sphere ofour experience.

Now, these dreams of mine (common to many) of the false but ineffablejoys, are they not a proof that there exist in the human brain hiddencapacities, dormant potentialities of bliss, unsuspected hitherto, tobe developed some day, perhaps, and placed within the reach of all,wakers and sleepers alike?

A sense of ineffable joy, attainable at will, and equal in intensity andduration to (let us say) an attack of sciatica, would go far to equalizethe sorrowful, one-sided conditions under which we live.

* * * * *

But there is one thing which, as a school-boy, I never dreamed--namely,that I, and one other holding a torch, should one day, by commonconsent, find our happiness in exploring these mysterious caverns of thebrain; and should lay the foundations of order where only misrule hadbeen before: and out of all those unreal, waste, and transitory realmsof illusion, evolve a real, stable, and habitable world, which all whorun may reach.

* * * * *

At last I left school for good, and paid a visit to my Uncle Ibbetson inHopshire, where he was building himself a lordly new pleasure-house onhis own land, as the old one he had inherited a year or two ago was nolonger good enough for him.

It was an uninteresting coast on the German Ocean, without a rock, or acliff, or a pier, or a tree; even without cold gray stones for the seato break on--nothing but sand!--a bourgeois kind of sea, charmless inits best moods, and not very terrible in its wrath, except to a fewstray fishermen whom it employed, and did not seem to reward verymunificently.

Inland it was much the same. One always thought of the country as gray,until one looked and found that it was green; and then, if one were oldand wise, one thought no more about it, and turned one's gaze inward.Moreover, it seemed to rain incessantly.

But it was the country and the sea, after Bluefriars and thecloisters--after Newgate, St. Bartholomew, and Smithfield.

And one could fish and bathe in the sea after all, and ride in thecountry, and even follow the hounds, a little later; which would havebeen a joy beyond compare if one had not been blessed with an uncle whothought one rode like a French tailor, and told one so, and mimickedone, in the presence of charming young ladies who rode in perfection.

In fact, it was heaven itself by comparison, and would have remained solonger but for Colonel Ibbetson's efforts to make a gentleman of me--anEnglish gentleman.

What is a gentleman? It is a grand old name; but what does it mean?

At one time, to say of a man that he is a gentleman, is to confer on himthe highest title of distinction we can think of; even if we arespeaking of a prince.

At another, to say of a man that he is _not_ a gentleman is almost tostigmatize him as a social outcast, unfit for the company of hiskind--even if it is only one haberdasher speaking of another.

_Who_ is a gentleman, and yet who _is not_?

The Prince of Darkness was one, and so was Mr. John Halifax, if we areto believe those who knew them best; and so was one "Pelham," accordingto the late Sir Edward Bulwer, Earl of Lytton, etc.; and it certainlyseemed as if _he_ ought to know.

And I was to be another, according to Roger Ibbetson, Esquire, ofIbbetson Hall, late Colonel of the--, and it certainly seemed as ifhe ought to know too! The word was as constantly on his lips (whentalking to _me_) as though, instead of having borne her Majesty'scommission, he were a hairdresser's assistant who had just come into anindependent fortune.

This course of tuition began pleasantly enough, before I left London, byhis sending me to his tailors, who made me several beautiful suits;especially an evening suit, which has lasted me for life, alas; andthese, after the uniform of the gray-coat school, were like aninitiation to the splendors of freedom and manhood.

Colonel Ibbetson--or Uncle Ibbetson, as I used to call him--was mymother's first cousin; my grandmother, Mrs. Biddulph, was the sister ofhis father, the late Archdeacon Ibbetson, a very pious, learned, andexemplary divine, of good family.

But his mother (the Archdeacon's second wife) had been the only childand heiress of an immensely rich pawnbroker, by name Mendoza; a